1 · POSITION
Granada took LHL-485 Forte Group in January 1996 with a hostile £3.9 billion tender offer, leaving the family about £350 million. Sir Rocco Forte and his sister LHL-P-425 Olga Polizzi founded LHL-033 Rocco Forte Hotels that same year, and the first hotel they bought was a former Forte Group hotel — The Balmoral, put up for sale by Granada.
2 · ⚑ THE NAME HAD TO BE WON BACK
The rights to the Forte name were lost with the company in 1996 and returned to him only in 2001, after the Compass de-merger, in a gesture intended to dispel the bitter legacy of the takeover. No other entry in this register describes a hotelier who had to reacquire his own surname. In 1997 he raised a billion pounds in the City to buy back more of what had been his, and was too late; he has called it one of the biggest moments of his life.
3 · CANDOUR
⚑ The Balmoral purchase is given as 1997 and as 1998, and the group as 14 hotels and, from November 2025, 16. The family line runs back to a café opened at Alloa in 1911 by his grandfather. The Public Investment Fund holds 49 per cent against the family’s 51. Nothing here establishes the terms of that investment.